Opinion

Atheism has plenty of adherents, but few internationally respected people we're happy to have speak for all. It's high time Richard Dawkins stepped back up to the plate

There's something verging on unseemly in the glee so many journalists have taken in the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act and in the incontrovertible fact that the Obama administration knowingly misled the American people about "keeping your plan". Magazine covers! Feuds! Late night comedians! Pursed-lipped statements of disappointment! The "breakdown" of the ACA has made analysts bold: "The Collapse of the Obama Presidency","Why Obama's 'iPod Presidency' Was Doomed", "the entire presidency is riding" on the exchanges, the promise that "you can keep your plan" is (quoting Rush Limbaugh here) "the biggest lie ever told by a siting president." Most people do not understand the ins and outs of the ACA. Most journalists don't understand it, either – and the clearest proof of that is that Obama shouldn't have been able to get away with the blanket language that he did. He was called on it, by Politifact, Factcheck.org and ABC in particular. Instructively, the fact-checking organizations found that the statement was at least "half true", and ABC allowed that the line "isn't literally true" and that Obama acknowledged in a press conference that it would be impossible for the government to entirely prevent changes to everyone's plan. It has never been a secret that there would be Americans whose coverage would change under the ACA, that some would face higher prices or, as they correctly surmise, "better" coverage is in the lead of the Washington Post story about the bill's passage.

In Arabic, "revolution" is a feminine noun. This is fitting, as without women revolutions are sterile. They have no movement, no life, no sound. Urdu, a distorter of tongues, pilfering as it does from Persian, Hindi, but largely Arabic, uses the masculine word for coup d'etat – inqilab – for revolution, rather than the accurate feminine: thawra. Perhaps that's why the Taliban were confused. Perhaps that's why they imagined that shooting a 15-year-old girl would somehow enhance their revolution.